First Author*

A number of intriguing business and technology events will be held in Oxford in June.

First, the Oxford Internet Institute is hosting a forum entitled Cyberspace: its protocols and public international law, given by Henrik Spang-Hanssen, a Researcher and Danish Supreme Court Lawyer. This event will be held on the 10th of June from 3.00 to 4.30 pm. If you would like to attend please email your name and affiliation, if any, to events@oii.ox.ac.uk

Later in the week, on June 12, the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics Special Lecture will be held in the James Martin 21st Century School. The lecture is entitled Unfinished business: money, ethics, and a better transplant system and will last from 2.00 until 3.30 pm. Timothy Murphy, Professor of Philosophy in the Biomedical Sciences Department of Medical Education, University of Illinois College of Medicine will be speaking, and has provided the following abstract:

Transplant policy in the United States relies on volunteers for donation, both living and dead. This approach cannot meet the increasing demand for transplantable organs. Novel approaches that work within a system of volunteers are unlikely to succeed either. In this special lecture, hosted by the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, the ethics of alternative systems are explored practically and philosophically.

Finally, Venturefest 2008 will be held at the Unipart Group of Companies, Unipart House, Cowley, Oxford, from 30 June – 01 July. Oxford University is a major sponsor of Venturefest, a free two-day networking forum providing vital support, advice and funding for early-stage and fast-growth business. The very exciting keynote speakers for this event will be Lord Sainsbury, reflecting on his recent report for HM Treasury, The Race to the Top. and Dr. Mike Grocott, leader of the Caudwell Xtreme Everest Expedition describing the research team’s endeavours to measure blood oxygen levels at 8400m.

At 4 pm on Thursday, 17 April, the Oxford Department of Biochemistry will host its 10th annual Rodney Porter Memorial Lecture. This year, Professor Frances Ashcroft, of the Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics, will discuss ‘Ion channels and diabetes: a rollercoaster ride’. The lecture will be held in the Martin Wood lecture theatre in the Department of Physics.

The Rodney Porter Memorial Lectures were inaugurated in 1998 as the premier event in the scientific calendar of the Department of Biochemistry, University of Oxford, and originally took place in the lecture theatre of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History.

The lectures were named after Rodney Porter, Nobel Laureate 1972 and Head of the Department of Biochemistry 1967-1985, in recognition of his outstanding contributions both to scientific research and to Oxford University.

First Author will provide a summary of Prof Ashcroft’s lecture in the coming weeks!

Each week, the Oxford Science news blog features a ‘Did you miss?’ section, to highlight some important publications and events occurring during the previous week. This is a great resource to keep up to date with the range of science being conducted every day in Oxford. For example, recent posts have included discovery of the world’s stretchiest material, by physicist David Keen, the OxSciBlog’s celebrations for Darwin’s birthday with the tale of his neglected crabs, potential implantation of insulin-producing beta cells as a treatment for Type 1 diabetics, and a discussion of the possibility of development of a vaccine for HIV.

The Oxford Science Blog can be found here.

Sir Paul Nurse, FRS, Nobel laureate in 2001 for medicine and currently the president of the Rockefeller University in New York, will be speaking in Oxford on February 18. This year’s GlaxoSmithKline lecture hosted by Somerville College is entitled, Milton and Darwin–two views of creation. It will be held at 5 pm in the Medical Sciences Teaching Centre Lecture Theatre, with live transmission to Lecture Theatre 2 at the John Radcliffe Hospital.

Sir Paul Nurse is a british biochemist, who studied biology as an undergraduate at the University of Birmingham and studied the process of cell differentiation as a graduate student, at the University of East Anglia. After postdoctoral work at Edinburgh and a laboratory of the Imperial Cancer Research Fund at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, Nurse was offered a position as the Chair of Microbiology at the University of Oxford in 1988. He then returned to the Imperial Cancer Research Fund (ICRF) at Lincoln’s Inn Fields as the scientific director in 1993, and was appointed the Director General of the ICRF in 1996. He was knighted in 1999. In 2002 the ICRF merged with the Cancer Research Campaign and became Cancer Research UK (CRUK). In 2003, Sir Paul became the president of Rockefeller University.

Sir Paul won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2001 with Leland H. Hartwell and R. Timothy Hunt, for their discoveries regarding cell cycle regulation by cyclin and cyclin dependent kinases.

The four hundred year-old Bodleian Library is no stranger to controversy and has never been afraid to innovate. First Author talks to Richard Ovenden, Associate Director and Keeper of Special Collections, about the University’s digitalisation programs and its partnerships with Google.

Download PDF

The University of Oxford organization FEST: Females in Engineering, Science and Technology, will host a lecture by Dr. Polly Matzinger on 5:30pm on Tuesday 26 June, at the Medical Sciences Teaching Center on South Parks Road. Dr. Matzinger will speak about Male and Female Scientists: Different Approaches.

Dr. Matzinger is currently a section head at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, at the National Institutes of Health, in Bethesda, Maryland, USA. Dr. Matzinger heads the T-Cell Tolerance and Memory Section of the Laboratory of Cellular and Molecular Immunology. Prior to arrival at the NIAID, Dr. Matzinger was a scientist at the Basel Institute for Immunology, did post-doctoral work at the University of Cambridge, and studied at the University of California, San Diego for her Ph.D. Before choosing a career in science, Dr. Matzinger worked in a number of non-typical jobs, such as a bar waitress, a jazz musician, and a Playboy bunny. Certainly her lecture promises to be both entertaining and informative.

Professor Peter Singer gave the first of this year’s Uehiro Lectures on Practical Ethics on the topic of Global Poverty at the Martin Wood lecture theatre, in Oxford’s Department of Physics, on the evening of 29 May. Addressing a packed lecture hall, Professor Singer set out his views on the moral obligations of the citizens of rich countries give money to aid the world’s poorest people.

Professor Singer described a world where a billion people live in extreme poverty, on one dollar or less a day, and are ‘undernourished, lack safe drinking water, cannot send their children to school, for whom healthcare is beyond their means and whose life expectancy is 48 years,’ and contrasted this with the world’s rich countries where the average person can enjoy luxuries previously unknown even to royalty.

Professor Singer declared that in the poorest nations 30,000 children are dying each day and that for citizens of rich countries to fail to take action to prevent this was comparable to failing to save a child’s life in order to protect an uninsured car.

Professor Singer argued that suffering as a result of extreme poverty is a bad thing and that if a person is able to prevent this suffering then morally they ought to do so, and that therefore not to support the world’s poorest people is a ‘failure to meet a minimum standard of moral decency.’

Professor Singer called on the ‘abundance and technology’ available in the richest nations to be used to ‘virtually eliminate, or significantly reduce, extreme poverty within the lifetime of some of us in this room.’

Professor Singer argued that individuals should take action in the form of donations to Oxfam or similar organisations, although he explained how a range of actions are available for individuals, from donations to political campaigning to voluntary work. He explained his argument is for action as a moral duty, not as part of a political programme to increase taxation or reduce inequality.

The lecture left extensive time for questions, during which Professor Singer was challenged and quizzed by the audience: on the choices and trade-offs for individuals, the role of aid organisations and the problems if only a few people met their moral obligations. Professor Singer acknowledged that there were many ‘difficult decisions’ for people to make, and a range of ways in which it is possible to act, but also how ‘it is in all our interests to minimise this argument.’

The Uehiro Lectures have been held annually since 2004. They are open to the public and contribute towards raising public understanding of ethical issues. The Lectures are run by the Oxford Uehiro Centre, the part of the Oxford philosophy faculty responsible for teaching and researching into ethical issues. Previous years’ lectures have covered issues such as morality in war and the ethics of genetic engineering.

Julian Savulescu, the Uehiro Professor of Practical Ethics, introduced the lectures, saying: ‘I would like to thank the Uehiro Foundation for Education and Ethics for their generous support and I would like also to say what an honour and a pleasure it is to introduce Peter Singer. I first attended one of his lectures in 1982, and at the end all of the students were talking, although they did not all agree with him. Peter is someone who can get you to think about the issues and has made a great difference to many people’s lives.’

Three forthcoming events at the University of Oxford’s Department for Continuing Education explore Web 2.0 as a business model. The sessions will focus on mobile social networking and user generated content. Registration is open now.

Mobile Social Networking - the Financial Saviour of the Mobile Sector (3 July 2007, University of Oxford, UK) Designed for those involved in the management and technical aspects of the mobile sector, this course will give an overview of the mobile social software, focus on the youth sector, and conclude with a discussion of the future of mobile applications in the context of social networking.

User Generated Content and Web 2.0 - A Strategic Viewpoint for Decision Makers (5 July 2007, University of Oxford, UK)
Designed for decision makers, this intensive one-day course offers an opportunity to learn more about the threats and opportunities arising from user generated content.

Mobile Web 2.0 and IMS : User Generated Content (from a telecoms / infrastructure perspective) (6 July 2007, University of Oxford, UK)
Designed for operators, people working in standardisation as well as software architects, this intensive one-day course will have a dual perspective. It will approach Web 2.0 from the user perspective and also from the IMS standpoint. It will cover the basics of IMS and will then discuss how IMS would apply in a user generated content / Web 2.0 world.

These events were also noted by Tim O’Reilly. We discussed the emergence of the mobile web in our article, ‘Mobilising Scholars‘, first published last year. For more information about mobile Web 2.0, the Open Gardens blog provides regular updates and has a page of Ajax FAQ.

The Martin Institute, headquartered at Oxford’s Said Business School, has announced a series of 6 Tuesday night lectures on the topic ‘Futures’ for the upcoming term

The first lecture, on 24 April, will feature Angela Wilkinson, the Director of Scenarios and Futures Research at the James Martin Institute. She will lecture on A brief history of Futures at the James Martin Institute Seminar Room, in the Saïd Business School, at 5 pm.

The second lecture will host Rafael Ramirez, a fellow of Saïd Business School & Templeton College. He will discuss Oxford: Scenarios and strategy from 5 pm at the same venue.

The next lecture, on May 8, will feature Betty Sue Flowers. The lecture will be at 3 pm in Said’s Lecture Theatre 5. Dr Flowers is the Federal CEO and Director LB Johnson Presidential Library, discussing Using the future to create the present.

In the fourth lecture, Bill Sharpe, CEO and co-founder of The Appliance Studio, will discuss Technology foresight: navigating with invisible islands. The lecture will be held at the James Martin Institute Seminar Room, in the Saïd Business School, at 5 pm.

The fifth lecture will feature Kees van der Heijdenn an Associate Fellow of both Templeton College and Saïd Business School, discussing Scenarios to strategy. The lecture will be held at the James Martin Institute Seminar Room, in the Saïd Business School, at 5 pm.

The sixth and final lecture will feature Gwyn Prins, the Mackinder Professor at LSE, discussing: Problems and possibilities with strategic assessment methods. The lecture will be held at the James Martin Institute Seminar Room, in the Saïd Business School, at 5 pm.

The 2007 Rodney Porter Memorial Lecture will take place on Thursday 10 May at the Museum of Natural History. The speaker will be Professor Kim Nasmyth, Head of the Department of Biochemistry at the Universit of Oxford. His work includes significant studies of gene activation during development and DNA replication. This lecture is entitled ‘The chemistry of chromatid segregation: bound together by a ring and separated by a protease that cleaves it’ and the event is open to the public. Look out for coverage on First Author.